1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of wireless communication and Internet services. More specifically, the invention revolves around recommending Internet services to mobile terminal users.
2. Background Art
Wireless devices and terminals are widely employed by people to access the growing number of available digital services. Such access typically entails the utilization of a menu structure to enable a wireless user to identify the service of interest to be accessed. However, such configurations are often slow and cumbersome for the user. In current mobile terminals, a service, such as a Wireless markup Language (WML) page, may be accessed by manually typing in a Universal Resource Locator (URL) of the required service or selecting a previously stored bookmark containing the URL of the required service. Another method involves the use of hypertext links to access a directly linked service.
Conventional mobile telecommunications devices such as telephone handsets, have been designed primarily for speech calls and have only a limited capability for handling data. Recommendations have been developed to provide a wireless application protocol (WAP) to promote common standards and specifications for data services that operate over wireless communication networks. WAP enabled telephone handsets have been developed which allow the user to access remote servers. Data content is provided in a mark up language, similar to conventional hyper text mark up language (HTML) known as a wireless mark up language (WML), which is configured to allow a page of WML data to be displayed as a deck of individual cards which are of the size suited for display on the relatively small display screen usually available on a mobile device such as a cellular telephone handset or personal digital assistant (PDA).
The data is supplied by WML servers at individual network addresses, with a homepage which act as an entry point to a particular site together with further pages or decks with individual addresses that can be navigated by the user. To this end, the mobile device is provided with a browser to display the data.
A WML server can be accessed by dialing an individual telephone number associated with a WAP gateway which acts as a proxy server between the WML server itself and the mobile device, which acts as the client.
Newer, faster data services for mobile communication devices have been developed, including I-Mode, GPRS and UMTS which operate in a generally similar way, with the mobile device acting as client to remote servers, and a browser to display the accessed data on the mobile device. The browser that is used for mobile telecommunications devices is conventionally known as a micro-browser, which is controlled by keys on the mobile device. Instead of using a mouse-driven cursor, a focus region is provided, which can be navigated around the display by keys which may include a scrolling key on the mobile device. The keys may be so-called soft keys which can be pre-programmed to perform different functions depending on the display provided by the browser. Conventionally, one of the soft keys allows the user to move backwards through previously visited network addresses. Also, a bookmark list may be stored so that individual network addresses can be readily accessed
One of the many problems of current systems is that all the services required by a user cannot be accessed via hyperlinks. Furthermore, user interfaces of many terminals are small, and have limited keyboard capabilities. Thus, the entry of URL's is thus slow and cumbersome, since the majority of URL's are long and unintuitive. Furthermore, current recommendation systems and algorithms cannot supply context-based recommendations, wherein bookmarks are organized and presented to the user according to customized protocols.